Pearce, Thomas. “‘...So it really is a series of tubes.’ ’s Data Centers, Noo-politics and the Architecture of Hegemony in Cyberspace ” Enquiry 10.1 (2013) 43-53. 13 volume 10|issue 1 “...So it really is a series of tubes.” Google’s Data Centers, Noo-politics and the Architecture of Hegemony in Cyberspace Thomas Pearce

ABSTRACT “You walk through those doors and the world opens up to you. It’s a culture where information is free. A culture where the more you share and In recent years, the physical manifestation and infrastructure of the the more you ask the more you get.”1 informational age has increasingly drawn the attention both of the popular imagination and of architectural theorists. This paper focuses on an “This is the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where aspect mostly overlooked to date, namely on its artistic representation. the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become It provides a critical analysis of a series of photographs manifest.” published by Google in October 2012 under the name “Where the internet “As we leave the floor, I feel almost levitated by my peek inside Google’s lives”. The photographs are examined as carefully staged constructions inner sanctum.” 2 of a specific imagination of information technology that, transcending a purely aesthetical or corporate critique, has broad political, socio- “Google, I really love you. If you were a person I would leave my wife geographical and economical implications. A first analysis of their and marry you :)_” composition, digital manipulation and visual impact situates the images “no Google , no protection!” “Beautiful. Clean and organized but with Google you would expect within a recent photographic current of the so called “anthropogenic 3 Sublime”. The paper then zooms out to reframe the photographs as a nothing less.” continuation of the euphoric techno-utopian discourse that surrounded the “This is corporate propaganda that truly is a treat for the eyes”4 popular dissemination of the internet in the early nineteen-nineties. This discourse hailed the internet as an inherently moral and emancipatory “...So it really is a series of tubes.“5 vehicle that, because of the non-physical nature of cyberspace, would liberate its users from traditional hegemonic dispositifs based on (Some reactions to the data center images) techniques of physical coercion. Tracing the transition from bio-political (Foucault) to noo-political dispositifs (Lazarrato, Deleuze) and discussing 1. Transparency the inextricable connection between information technology, territorial On the 17th of October 2012, the world was in awe as Google went conflict and socio-geographic inequality, the article goes on to account transparent. On a website called “Where the internet lives”, Google for the demise of the dream of a “bodiless and moral internet”. Finally, released a series of over 80 images by photographer Connie Zhou, the data center images are re-read in more detail and discussed as offering the first ever glimpse into their top-secret data centers.6 part of the life-support system of a failed utopia - sustaining a popular yet reductionist understanding of the informational society and its key Up to that point, the Google data centers, accommodating the search players. engine’s ever growing number of servers, had been clouded in secrecy. An article, published earlier that year in Wired Magazine, described how, KEYWORDS: civilian-military-industrial complex, cybernetics, “paranoid about the competitors catching a glimpse of its gear”, Google cyberspace, data centers, hegemony, infrastructure, internet, noo- let the maintenance staff of an outsourced farm work in complete politics, photography, sustainability darkness, only allowing the use of miner’s headlamps.7

In their own data centers, the company developed the most advanced customized server hardware, including highly efficient techniques for the demanding task of cooling its servers. Once disclosed, as critics like Greenpeace argued, these techniques could also help to sink the carbon footprint of other companies and thus enhance the sustainability of the entire sector. Facebook, one of the advocates of sharing know-

ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 43 certain awe-inspiring quality. Presenting a highly aestheticizing gaze on the man-made environment, the images have a certain kinship to the work of photographers like Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky or Bas Princen, who operate within a recent tradition of what could be called the “anthropogenic Sublime”. The Sublime was originally described by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger... Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror”.10

Figure 1: “Where the internet lives”, Photographer: Connie Zhou Figure 2: Bas Princen, Valley (China), 2008 how had made a point of publishing its data and allowing journalists and Whereas for Burke the Sublime was to be found in the vastness of nature architectural photographers into their own data centers.8 and the inevitability of the Divine, for the photographers in question the natural landscape of the romantic tradition - in its entirety cultivated and Then Google struck back, and its strategy was sophisticated: by not just exploited, known and broadcasted - has lost its aura of mystery and allowing a newspaper photographer to visit their facilities for a day but danger. Instead, the infrastructural, (post)industrial, and urban landscape instead hiring an architectural photographer, who spent multiple weeks has become the source of the Sublime. The dual emotion of danger and exploring and photographing9, Google proved that its data centers were attraction is now invoked by the “vertiginous dynamic of globalization”, a not only transparent, but above all, that they were beautiful. globalization that arguably has become our new “Divine”.11

2. The Anthropogenic Sublime Let us take as an example the series of photographs of stock exchanges Even when refraining from the quasi-religious enthusiasm of the quotes from around the world that Gursky produced in the late nineties. The opening this article, it is hard to deny that the photographs have a images show, from a bird’s eye perspective, vast and colorful seas of

44 ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 people, paper and screens. The depth of field stretches the entire image, completely mirrored around their central axes. Blogs and newspapers, showing every element in crisp detail. Gursky thereby refuses to establish which just previously had published the images and had shared in the hierarchy, bathing the image in an extensive sameness that does not excitement surrounding them, felt deceived and published illustrated seem to be confined by its frame but extends far beyond and deep into analyses of the manipulations.13 our own existence. It is the vastness and abstraction of man-made global capitalism gone out of control that is at once disturbing and aesthetic and Google was fast to react and in turn released some before-after images thus serves as the source of the Sublime. In these photographs, man and an interview with the photographer: himself becomes the “man-made” landscape.

Figure 3: Andreas Gursky, Chicago Board of Trade II, 1999

Interestingly, Gursky has often been compared to the painter Caspar “Beauty is something with a lot of symmetry. It’s more about the lines of David Friedrich, the master of the romantic Sublime. Gursky, in turn, everything I photograph [...] My goal was to help people see the beauty regards the distinction between the painter and the photographer as of the data centers. I had a certain artistic license to interpret the scene, outdated, seeing both as producers of “images” in a broad sense of but Google didn’t want me to hide or obscure anything - any changes I the word.12 Any Photoshop user will confirm how similar the process of made to a scene were aesthetic.”14 digital post-production - with its brushes, stamps and sponges - is to the process of painting. Like a painter, the photographer can manipulate that It is not my intention here to do the work of Photoshop forensics and which is depicted and thereby amplify (his understanding of) the truth. uncover that the images are manipulated. Nor do I want to engage in the discussion on whether it is correct to use artistic license to manipulate Soon after Google’s data center photographs were published, critical these images. Rather, I want to concentrate here on the question what observers started noticing and blogging about the fact that they too kind of image is constructed through manipulation and how techniques were heavily manipulated. In the most blatant cases, the images were of manipulation and composition contribute to this constructed reality.

ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 45 Because, in spite of the artist’s statement, composition is not just a He goes on to state: matter of aesthetics. “The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of 3. Soothing Symmetry us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.”15 Symmetric composition, for example, is much more than an aesthetic choice. The construction of many of the data center images is based on Following McLuhan’s argument, the data center images thus try to central perspective (achieved sometimes, but not exclusively, through achieve the impossible: to depict the “instantaneous world of electric mirroring). Describing an example of renaissance central perspective, informational media” (the “internet” didn’t exist at the time of writing) Marshall McLuhan dramatically states: as a framed, thus controlled and externalized central perspective. The human, the viewer, is placed outside of the framed image. In the few

Figure 5: Fransesco di Giorgio, Ideal City, 1477

cases where a human appears in the data center images, he is neatly arranged to coincide with the central perspective’s vanishing point. Surrounding him, the server racks, made for the human scale, are well labeled and securely kept, like the shelves of a library. All is within reach of the vitruvian maintainer.

If Gursky’s manipulations create disturbing flatness and vastness defying the rules of perspective and control, the data center images attempt quite the opposite. Their soothing symmetry seems to suggest to us that we need not worry, that those in charge have everything under control. In other words, if Gursky’s images seem to echo the logic of extensionism and second-class cybernetics - in which the observer himself is understood as an intrinsic part of the system he observes - the data center images speak the language of first-class cybernetics - of the subject, the engineer in charge.16

These observations start to suggest that there is more at stake here than the critique of aesthetics or of corporate propaganda. Indeed, the Figure 4: Manipulation Analysis, Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant photographs are revealing with regard to our perception of “the” Internet. At this point it is important to emphasize that the identification of Google “The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement // The Detached Observer. No (or its data centers) with the Internet, as suggested by the title of the Involvement! The Viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed photographic essay “Where the Internet lives”, shouldn’t be accepted outside the frame of experience. “ without further reflection. Google is a multinational organization known mainly for its search engine - it searches the internet without being it.

46 ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 However, as the verb “to google” is being included in most dictionaries financial, that originally underlay it - relations that would be obfuscated and the “ungoogleable” increasingly becomes the limit of our epistemic by studying it solely as a “work of art”.17 horizon, it is fair to say that in public perception, Google is increasingly identified, as a pars pro toto, with the Internet. Therefore, a study of the 4. The Utopia of a Bodiless and Moral Internet Google data centre images can indeed lead us to broader conclusions “Code is the architecture of the 90´s” (Douglas Coupland, Microserfs)18 regarding the production of an image of the Internet. The image of the Internet constructed through the data center photographs Let us now take one step further back and ask ourselves: by whom has its origin in the utopian ideals that surrounded the advent of the and for whom are these mental constructs produced (i.e. not just the internet in the 1990s. At this point, therefore, a brief digression into this history is apposite.

The hope that the Internet could be a liberating and emancipatory force is nowhere as clearly expressed as in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Against the old, physical world of “flesh and steel”, he puts the bodiless world of the Internet:

“Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”

Consequently, freed of the inherited power relations of matter, the Internet is hailed as an emancipatory tool:

“Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. [...] Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.” 19

Interestingly enough, political forces both on the left and on the right shared this cyberspace euphoria. The Italian Autonomists, for example, celebrated the advent of the Internet because, driven by the immaterial forces of language and subjectivity, it would enable a neo-communist utopia.20

On the other side of the political spectrum, a far more influential utopian Figure 6: “Where the internet lives”, Photographer: Connie Zhou brainchild of this era was the so-called “Californian Ideology”. It was a peculiar mix of the concept of bodiless and emancipatory information photographs in question but the understanding of technology and the technology and the anti-state ideology of individualism and meritocracy. Internet that they conjure up)? Whose purposes and benefits do they In a “post-industrial, post-capitalist, knowledge based economy, the serve? And maybe also: what don’t they show? For when examined exploitation of information and knowledge would drive growth and wealth in the broader context of its production, every image can shed light on creation while diminishing the older power structures of the state in favor those power relations, whether they be political, social, geographical, or of connected individuals in virtual communities.”21

ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 47 Originally the ideology of the managerial class of Silicon Valley, these se moral, not per se emancipatory and that it can eventually also be ideas spread rapidly to influence the highest of American political instrumentalized by techniques of hegemony and noo-politics. spheres.22 Its economical translation was called the New Economy - the belief that, if only the state would keep its hand off the economy, it would 6. Place Matters function as a kind of cybernetic self-regulating system, run by computers The realization of the very existence of the data centers, banal though and the logic of feedback. The optimism of New Economy famously led it may seem, is a smack in the face for the credo of the immaterial to the late-nineties politics of laisser-faire, deregulation and privatization. Internet. Information has refused to dematerialize. The data centers are the “places of the space of flows” that show that place does matter; that 5. Utopia’s Failure property - deemed obsolete by Barlow’s Declaration - is still relevant; “We all get older and smarter”, Perry Barlow observed in 2004 when that owning - no matter how deterritorialized the object owned - is still evaluating his optimism of the nineties.23 Indeed, it is not an overstatement performed in spatial terms. to say that the utopian hopes sparked by information technology have in large parts been disappointed. In the context of the global economy, The implications of these observations are rather far-reaching. The a series of economic crises have discredited the New Economy. They Internet is not only intrinsically territorial in that it is territorially owned proved that the politics of laisser-faire did not lead to a self-regulating but also because it owes its existence to territorial conflict and territorial system to the benefit of all but instead led to a system regulated by inequality. the interests of banks and corporations that benefited only a dwindling number of the happy few. First of all, the development of the Internet springs from territorial conflict. Research and development in information technology were long The internet itself doesn’t seem to have fulfilled its promises either. dominated by the so-called military-industrial complex. Like other dual- For instance, the freedom of thought and identity praised by Barlow use technologies, such as the Global Positioning System, the Internet is has made place for a commodification of subjectivity, as “multinational a brainchild of the cold war period - a war that, as it never “took place”, corporations have determined how to extract monetary value from the was indeed less dominated by actual physical weapons than by the Internet primarily by exploiting the social life and free labor of its users.”24 abstract possibility of their imminent deployment or even existence. The Should we then revise our comparison of data centers to libraries and military-industrial complex not only produced political dominance and the describe them instead as banks, for which the currency is information, feeling of safety, but also contributed to national economic growth.26 and which trade our personal and intimate information to data miners in transaction chains that are unintelligible to the information’s actual From the seventies on, information technology was opened up for civilian owner; banks that pay interest only in the form of the comfort of using use and was commercialized and privatized. In public perception, its their services? military origin became increasingly mystified as it was transplanted from the Pentagon to the garage. Although the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley In addition, the revelations in the summer of 2013 of whistleblower Edward had “merely skimmed the cream off the top”27 of military development, Snowden, former employee of the , about the the Garage Myth (this late twentieth century version of the American extent of government spying on its own citizens through access to the dream) imagined them as independent, creative and individual discovers servers of large tech companies like Google - the very servers depicted that developed their ideas in the apolitical zone of the private home. in the images under study - has given a definitive deathblow to the idea The introduction of information technology to the larger public in fact of the internet as inherently free. Whatever the nature of the companies’ proved so successful that it inversed the logic of the military-industrial involvement in these operations might have been25, public perception of complex. Owing to this proliferation, but also to drastic cuts in military privacy and data storage has experienced a massive shift. The naively spending following the end of the cold war, the military has become positive notion of transparency exemplified by the data centre images increasingly dependent on the innovation of the private sector. To take has backfired - revealing the citizens themselves as the ones transparent an example, the simulation software developed in Silicon Valley for use to the gaze of the government, who’s own operations remain covert. in animated Hollywood movies or in gaming technology is received with How can we explain the failure of this tech-utopia? It could be argued open arms by the American military. Thus, by now, the “state’s monopoly that its nonfulfillment is, in fact, based on the falseness of itsvery over violence depends on global consumption of entertainment, premises: the Internet as bodiless and the Internet as intrinsically moral. communication and transportation.”28 The state now takes measures to The following paragraphs will elaborate upon, and deconstruct, these “stimulate the creation of an integrated civilian-military industrial base.”29 two assumptions. Firstly by illustrating that the physical world refuses This alliance is characterized by public-private partnerships, like the to die and that hegemony is still founded in “real” space, and secondly cooperation between Google and NASA on the Gigapan project.30 by stating that even the bodiless, virtual realm of the internet is not per When looking at Silicon Valley not as a narrative but as a geographical

48 ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 place, where military testing facilities and Facebook, Google and In other words: in times of mass-communication, the control over a Lockheed Martin, NASA and IBM are close neighbors, the intertwining discourse becomes equally as important as, and in fact constituent of, of private and public interests, of military and civilian goals, becomes economic, political and territorial power. It is the era of “soft power” in immediately apparent. which the logic of coercion has been replaced by the far more subtle logic of persuasion. A visit to Silicon Valley also reveals a second, very territorial, condition on which the Information Society is built: socio-geographical inequality. 8. Utopia on Life Support The growing wealth of the Valley’s “digerati” is unthinkable without the It is in this context, as instruments of persuasion and noo-politics, that backing of a much larger group of thousands of (mainly non-white) badly the data center images are to be situated. Because, though it has paid, unskilled manufacturing and assembly workers, mainly living in the become obvious that in cyberspace, property and context do matter, South of the Valley.31 Also beyond its Californian cradle, the Information subjectivity and identity are not per se free - in short the utopia of the Age is characterized by “technological apartheid” and a growing gap bodiless and emancipatory internet has failed to materialize -, there are between information haves and have-nots.32 powers at work that have every reason to keep this naive optimism of information technology as an “inherently humane, democratizing force in 7. The Amoral Web and Noo-politics contemporary life”36 alive in public opinion. The images thus are part of The second premise to be scrutinized here is that of information the complex life-support system of a failed utopia. technology as per se moral and emancipatory. In his 2005 essay titled The Amorality of the Web 2.0, Nicholas Carr cynically stated it as follows: So let us now return to the images themselves. Their soothing symmetry “Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It‘s a set of technologies as a means of staging Google as a good caretaker, in perfect control of [...] that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. the stored information, has already been investigated. If we now allow It doesn‘t care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn‘t care ourselves the aforementioned pars pro toto identification - analyzing the whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. [...] So data centre images as images of the internet - what vision of this Internet let‘s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what do the photographs communicate? we wish it would be.“ First, re-examining the context of the images’ release, it might be Whether or not joining in Carr’s defeatism, it is important to understand suggested that the withholding of technical know-how was not the only his distinction between technological means and ideological goals. motivation for the secrecy surrounding the data centers. It was also Rather than automatically subverting or even transcending existing the reluctance to present the Internet as a physical entity, to disclose hegemonies, the advent of the “amoral” internet has merely extended the Internet as a “place”. It is the same motivation behind Google not the sphere of action of hegemonic techniques - and of their contestation. representing itself as a physical product: it does not have a star architect Once subjectivity has been liberated within the immaterial realm of designing its headquarters - think Foster’s iconic Apple headquarters in interconnected brains, exercising power is redefined as “establishing Cupertino; nor does it implant its presence into the physical fabric of command over subjectivity itself”.33 the city - think the “bold architectural statements” of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s signature Apple concept stores.37 The definition of power as the ability to influence and construct public opinion and collective perception through telematic technologies is what Once forced by public scrutiny to give up this mystifying abstractness, an Maurizio Lazzarato calls noo-politics (from the Greek noo, mind). After image of the Internet is conjured up that consists of a number of claims Foucault’s bio-politics and disciplinary societies, noo-politics operate associated with the utopia of the bodiless and moral Internet. within a “society of control”, in which power is no longer exercised over First of all, the Internet is flow, not space. The data center’s colorful the class or the crowd but over the “public”. It is “the public of the media, cables, pipes and ducts echo the aesthetic of the Centre Pompidou but the public of a newspaper: […] a dispersed crowd in which the influence also the words of one of its most fervent advocates: of minds […] on one another has become an action at a distance.”34 “When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, The immaterial strategies of “modulation of the brain” do not, however, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi re-verberators, replace the material logic and techniques of physical coercion antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters -when it contains so many services characterizing disciplinary societies (such as the spatial segregation and that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from geopolitical conflicts discussed above). Rather, they are “superimposed the house, why have a house to hold it up.” upon them”, so that “noo-politics commands and reorganizes the other power relations because it operates at the most deterritorialized level.”35

ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 49 Finally, the Internet is in nature, not in territory. The data centers are shown, not in the US or in (closely allied) countries like or , they are not integrated in an urban or infrastructural fabric, with its complex overlapping of interests and inequalities. Their deterritorialized environment is a natural one, in which they thrive symbiotically. Sustainability, the main focus of the images’ captions, is also radiated by the images: the data centers yield energy from wind mills and cooling from the ice of the surrounding lake. A herd of deer fearlessly approaches the data center and peacefully grazes on the surrounding grasses.

This last image is an obvious case of digital manipulation and was immediately uncovered as such by online Photoshop forensics. The data center images are carefully crafted utopian constructions.

9. Projected Machinations The recent revival of the data centre images following the aforementioned revelations of mass government surveillance, makes strikingly apparent the momentariness and fallibility of such utopian constructions. Now that anxiety about data storage and privacy has shifted into the foreground of public consciousness, the images have reappeared as decontextualised stock images that illustrate articles on the NSA, PRISM and “the architecture of surveillance”.38

One image seems to be particularly popular in this context.39 The symmetrically composed photograph shows the colourfully lit aisle of a network room in an Iowa data centre. At the vanishing point, a person appears. Two layers of plastic curtains separating different thermal zones within the data centres reflect the bright router lamps and, overlaying the reflections upon the figure, turn it into a blurred silhouette. The identity of Figure 7: Reyner Banham and Francois Dallegret, Illustration from “a Home is this silhouette becomes ambivalent: whereas in the original publication not a House”, 1965 context, one would have intuitively identified him as a maintainer, now he becomes an easy target for the viewer’s imagination of more ominous In Reyner Banham’s vision, the flow emancipates itself from its container machinations. - as the mind had emancipated from place in the nineties utopias of the Internet. The pipes in the photographs are to be read as these In short, the reception of the images in question is conditioned by the timely flows, as arrows (so fetishisized in current architectural representation), projections of public perception as well as by the original intentionality of as circulation. All is in flux, nothing is fixed - as is the case forthe its production. The two, of course, stand in mutually interdependency representation of the or other Google headquarters, where and it is unlikely that, if the photographs were taken today, they would flexibility, play and changeability are enacted by a creative and colorful be constructed in quiet the same way. However, the aim of this article chaos of bikes, bean bags, slides, ping pong and artificial has been more to study the mechanisms behind the images’ production beaches. Effectively, by outplaying and masking the actual building in than to reconstruct their public reception. This production then, must the background, they dematerialize its architectural body. The Internet be analyzed within its historical context, a snapshot of a now difficult to is bodiless. grasp pre-Snowden moment of innocent transparency. Also, the Internet is flat, not hierarchic. Shot from a (central) birds-eye perspective, the servers are lined up in the egalitarian and endlessly 10. Conclusion expandable modules of the industrial warehouse grid. The Internet is In this article, we have interpreted the Google data centre images democratic. published as “Where the internet lives” as symbolic representations of the space of the Internet which act as a life-support system of its failed utopia. Such representations of space are, as Henri Lefebvre has

50 ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 Figure 8: Image from “Where the internet lives”, Photographer: Connie Zhou pointed out, inherently conservative as they “serve to maintain [...] social The visual attraction, the aesthetic splendor of the photographs is relations in a state of coexistence and cohesion. It displays them while instrumental in the dissemination of this discourse. Not only does is draw displacing them — and thus concealing them in symbolic fashion — with attention in a time of information overload and “Economy of Attention”43. the help of, and onto the backdrop of, nature”.40 The utopia of a bodiless Also, by being complaisant, they make us feel comfortable with the status and moral Internet thus sustains existing hegemonies, the success of quo. The images are symbolic universes that are a “means of recognition which depends on “their ability to reveal what is beyond dispute and rather than knowledge”44; they soothe rather than irritate. Hence the to hide what ought to be discussed”.41 We have also pinpointed quite title of this essay, quoting the reaction of a to the release of the a number of topics “that ought to be discussed” - socio-geographical images: “so it really is a series of tubes”. inequality, corporate interest, interdependencies within the military- industrial-informational complex. So what can be gained from this analysis? The message of this article is something of a brainteaser. It describes how technologies extend into our The images are instruments of noo-politics as they create a “discursive mind only to make us believe they are exterior to it. It unravels techniques sphere that allows for the consolidation of merchant power and the of how a medium (the internet) is used to disseminate an image of this continued existence of the military-industrial complex beyond the reach same medium mystifying these very techniques. of public scrutiny and possible contestation.” Crucial to the creation of this discourse is the “ability to present its own interests as universal and It is important to unravel these mystifications, to deconstruct our own objective.”42 comfort zones and to understand the interdependencies and multiplicities of the status quo, before formulating a counter-utopia that falls in the same logical traps or adheres the same naive optimism. A model

ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 51 exclusively concentrating on providing democratic access to the Internet McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin, The Medium is the Massage or on protecting the private informational sphere against commodification : an Inventory of Effects, Corte Madera: Gingko, 2001. would not address political or socio-geographical issues and would fail to acknowledge the interdependencies of the virtual and physical realms Ohlin, Alix. 2002. “Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime”. Art that define the Internet. Journal. 61 (4): 23-35. Von Knöfel, Ulrike "Das mit der Wahrheit ist Quatsch. Interview mit Likewise, a discourse that presents the Internet as a necessarily liberating Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff,” Der Spiegel, March 12, 2012. or hegemonic force would fail to acknowledge the Internet’s multiplicity, deriving from the multiple uses of an amoral medium. A useful model for Winner, Langdon, "Silicon Valley Mystery House," in Variations on a counter-agency would thus situate itself on the interface between the theme park: the new American city and the end of public space, ed. physical and virtual, at the “intertwining of flows and places”45 and would Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 30-60. use the internet as a tool for change rather than just hailing it as the deliverer of liberation. Wright, Gwendolyn, "The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley," Journal of Architectural Education 54/2 (Nov. 2000): 88-94. Bibliography Endnotes Augé, Marc, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of 1 Paul Rhode, October 17, 2012, “Where the internet lives,” http://www. Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. paulrohde.com/where-the-internet-lives, accessed October 5, 2013.

Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 2008. 2 Steven Levy, “Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center,” Wired, October 17, 2012, accessed October 5, 2013, http:// Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center. of the Sublime and Beautiful, London: Routledge, 1958, originally 3 Google Plus forum users, October 20 to October 24, 2012, accessed published in 1757. January 5, 2013, https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/Gk8ScjPX23n. 4 “Google tries wowing the world with a look at its data centers,” Castells, Manuel, “Space of Flows, Space of Places.” In Rethinking Technet Online, October 21, 2012, accessed 10 January 2013, http:// Technology. A Reader in Architectural Theory, edited by William Braham technet-online.com/google-tries-wowing-the-world-with-a-look-at-its- and Jonathan Hale, 450-456. London: Routledge, 2007. data-centers. Coupland, Douglas, Microserfs. London: Flamingo, 1995. 5 “Where the Internet Lives: The First-Ever Glimpse Inside Google’s Data Centers,” Colossal, October 17, 2012, accessed October 5, 2013, Franck, Georg, Mentaler Kapitalismus: Eine politische Ökonomie des http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/10/where-the-internet-lives-the-first- Geistes. Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005. ever-glimpse-inside--data-centers. Halpin, Harry, "The Philosophy of Anonymous. Ontological Politics 6 “Where the internet lives”. without Identity," Radical Philosophy 17 (2012): 19-28. 7 Cade Metz, “Super-Secret Google Builds Servers in the Dark,” Wired, March 15, 2012, accessed October 5, 2013, http://www.wired.com/ Hozic, Aida, "Uncle Sam Goes to Siliwood: Of Landscapes, Spielberg wiredenterprise/2012/03/google-miner-helmet/?rm. and Hegemony," Review of International Political Economy 6/3 8 Alexis Madrigal, “Open Source Design 04: The architecture of (Autumn, 1999):289-312. Facebook”, Domus, June 23, 2011, accessed 5 October, 2013, http:// www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2011/06/23/open-source-design-04- Lefebvre, Henri, The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. the-architecture-of-facebook.. Lazzarato, Maurizio, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: Eric Smalley, “Facebook Seeks Free Love Among Data Center Giants,” A potential politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy (Minneapolis, Wired, 28 October, 2011, accessed 5 October, 2013, http://www.wired. University of Minnesota Press, 2006) 134-146. com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/facebook-open_compute/. Martin Schoeller, “A glimpse inside a Facebook server farm,” Time Lazzarato, Maurizio, "The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Magazine, accessed 5 October, 2015, http://www.time.com/time/ Societies of Control," in Deleuze and the Social, ed, Martin Fuglsang photogallery/0,29307,2036928,00.html. and Bent Meier Sorensen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 9 “Interview: Connie Zhou On Being The First Photographer Inside 2006), 171-190. Google’s Massive Data Centers,” Pop Photo, accessed October 5, May, Christopher, The Information Society: A Sceptical View. 2013, http://www.popphoto.com/photos/2012/10/interview-connie-zhou- Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. being-first-photographer-inside-googles-massive-data-centers.

52 ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 10 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas 28 Aida Hozic, “Uncle Sam Goes to Siliwood: Of Landscapes, Spielberg of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Routledge, 1958), 36. and Hegemony,” Review of International Political Economy 6/3 11 Alix Ohlin, “Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime,” Art (Autumn, 1999): 301. Journal 61 (2002): 25. 29 Quoted from the Council of Economic Advisors by Hozic, “Uncle 12 Ulrike Von Knöfel, “Das mit der Wahrheit ixst Quatsch. Interview mit Sam Goes to Siliwood,” 297. Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff,” Der Spiegel, March 12, 2012, 143. 30 “About Gigapan”, last modified 5 October, 2013, http://gigapan.com/ 13 Peter van de Ploeg, “Google publiceert prachtige foto’s van cms/about-us. datacentra – maar zijn ze echt?”, NRC, October 20, 2012, accessed 31 Winner, “Silicon Valley Mystery House,” 49. October 5, 2013, http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2012/10/20/google- 32 Manuel Castells, “Space of Flows, Space of Places,” in Rethinking publiceert-prachtige-fotos-van-datacentra-maar-zijn-ze-echt-nee/. Technology. A Reader in Architectural Theory, ed. William Braham and 14 “Interview: Connie Zhou On Being...” Jonathan Hale (London: Routledge, 2007) 450. 15 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage 33 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: : an Inventory of Effects (Corte Madera: Gingko, 2001), 53. A potential politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy (Minneapolis, 16 Although one could of course argue that, in a final act of printing or University of Minnesota Press, 2006) 134. publishing the photographs and presenting them as art pieces, both 34 Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the effectively objectify and externalize them. Societies of Control,” in Deleuze and the Social, ed, Martin Fuglsang 17 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2008), 4. and Bent Meier Sorensen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 18 Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (London: Flamingo, 1995), 23. 2006), 197. 19 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of 35 Lazzarato, “The Concepts of Life,” 187. Cyberspace,” February 9, 1996, accessed October 5, 2013, https:// 36 Winner, “Silicon Valley Mystery House,” 49. projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 37 "Apple Store, Fifth Avenue,” Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, accessed 20 Harry Halpin, “The Philosophy of Anonymous. Ontological Politics December 16, 2013, http:// without Identity,” Radical Philosophy 17 (2012): 20. www.bcj.com/public/projects/project/82. 21 Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View 38 AJ Artemel, “The Architecture of Surveillance,” Gizmodo, 18 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), quoted by “The Californian Ideology,” June, 2013, accessed 19 December, 2013, http://www.gizmodo.com. accessed October 5, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californian_ au/2013/06/the-architecture-of-surveillance. Ideology. 39 e.g. Nicole Perloth and John Markoff, “N.S.A. May Have Hit Internet 22 Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Companies at a Weak Spot,” , 25 November, 2013, Documentary (May 23, 2011, BBC2). accessed 19 December, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/ 23 Brian Doherty, “John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of technology/a-peephole-for-the-nsa. cyberspace reinvents his body — and his politics”, Reason, August/ Leo Kelion, “Q&A: NSA’s Prism internet surveillance scheme”, BBC September, 2004, accessed October 5, 2013, http://reason.com/ News, 1 July, 2013, accessed 19 December, 2013, http://www.bbc. archives/2004/08/01/john-perry-barlow-20. co.uk/news/technology-23051248. 24 Halpin, “The Philosophy of Anonymous,” 20. 40 Henri Lefebvre, The production of space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 25 The companies insist on not having cooperated with government 32. by giving them access to their data. Recent revelations indicate 41 Hozic, “Uncle Sam Goes to Siliwood,” 304. that the N.S.A. has obtained direct access to their information by 42 Hozic, “Uncle Sam Goes to Siliwood,” 299-301. tapping the fiber-optic cables connecting the data centers. Ewen 43 Georg Frank, Mentaler Kapitalismus: Eine politische Ökonomie des MacAskill et al., “GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to Geistes (Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005) 177. world’s communications,” The Guardian, 21 June, 2013, accessed 19 44 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of December, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq- Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995) 33. cables-secret-world-communications-nsa. 45 Manuel Castells, “Space of Flows,” 447. 26 Gwendolyn Wright, “The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley,” Journal of Architectural Education 54/2 (Nov. 2000): 89. 27 Langdon Winner, “Silicon Valley Mystery House,” in Variations on a theme park : the new American city and the end of public space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 43.

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